President Ion
Iliescu joined Romanian Jewish survivors of World War II
on Sunday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the
killings of Jews by a Romanian fascists during a failed
coup. The killings occurred Jan. 21-23, 1941, in
Bucharest and other Romanian cities.

The Iron Guard, a
Romanian fascist organization, robbed and tortured
hundreds of Jews, of whom 120 perished. Some 25
synagogues and temples were ransacked in the campaign of
terror. The Iron Guard was trying to create mayhem to
destabilize and overthrow Romania's pro-Nazi military
ruler Marshal Ion Antonescu. The rampage was crushed by
Antonescu's troops. He then outlawed the Guard. In a
memorial service in Bucharest, Iliescu condemned the
"barbaric acts'' of the Iron Guard.

About half of the
800,000 Jews who lived in Romania before World War II
were killed during the war. Hundreds of thousands of
Romanian Jews left for Israel during the communist
period. Just 12,000 mostly elderly Jews live in Romania
today.

Iliescu, a
70-year-old former communist, recalled in a speech at the
Jewish Coral Temple how his father's Jewish friend was
killed. "I personally experienced those horrific
moments,'' Iliescu told elderly Jews.

A Jewish survivor,
Victor Barladeanu, 72, said: "My family and about 20
other people hid in the attic of my house.'' Barladeanu,
a writer, said a Romanian barber in the neighborhood
saved his family. "The man stayed outside (our house)
with a club in his hand and told the mobs: 'There are no
Jews here.' He was a big man ... and nobody argued with
him.''

Still, Iliescu
criticized as exaggerated Jewish claims of the number of
victims in Romania during the Holocaust. "Inflating the
number of Jewish victims in Romania, to stir compassion,
stands in the way of better ties between Romania and
Israel.

During World War
II, northwestern Romanian territory was under Hungarian
control. More than 150,000 Jews from this region died in
Nazi death camps. Romanians like to distance themselves
from these deaths. Antonescu is known to have deported
more than 150,000 Romanian Jews to the Soviet Union;
80,000 of them died.

Pro-fascist groups
were outlawed under communist rule, which collapsed in
1989. Since then, several groups claiming to be
successors of the Guard have appeared. They claim the
Guard was unfairly blamed for the Jewish killings. Serban
Suru, a 41-year-old leader of one of today's pro-Guard
movements, opposes a year-old school curriculum on the
Holocaust. Suru's group has just 100 members. The
ultranationalist Greater Romania Party is the country's
second-largest party, holding one-fourth of parliamentary
seats. It considers Antonescu a hero. Its leader,
Corneliu Vadim Tudor, has often expressed anti-Jewish
sentiment. He was defeated in a runoff presidential
election in December by Iliescu..